July 10 through August 24, 2023

Opening Reception: Thursday July 11, 5:30-7:30pm

Gallery Paule Anglim is pleased to present an exhibition of new collage works by Ken Graves.

Grave’s collage works belong to a tradition of small paper compositions made from engraving reproductions found in journals and books. Like his Surrealist forebears, Graves plays with wit, the incongruous and the unexpected. His masterfully put-together arrangements read like narratives of light social parody and deranged psychology. To the delicately juxtaposed engraving and photographic constructions he adds obsessive handwork, attaching thread, tiny objects, like beads and feathers, to infuse an aspect of tactile, old-worldly craft. 

Graves has worked many years and taught photography at Pennsylvania State University, before returning to the Bay Area, where he studied in the 1960’s. His collage works employ a keen sense of the unique reality a photo image communicates. They combine images from different decades, paying simultaneous homage to Victorian paper collages, to Surrealism and to the cultures of scientific illustration and instruction manuals.

Graves works are represented in important public collections including the New York MoMA, SFMOMA, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the George Eastman House and the National Library, Paris among others.